After five hundred years of varying degrees of decimation, mestizaje, and syncretism, an increasing number of people from Alaska to Patagonia are identifying themselves as, or are thought of as, American Indians. Their demands for the redress of iniquities committed by non-Indians—some to their ancestors and some they still endure—have recently risen to a clamor. In Résistances indiennes, Jean- François Lecaillon treats all these people as one ἒτvoς as he skips back and forth from Bolivia to Dakota.
The principal contribution of this book is its catalogue of “Indianist” movements across both continents since World War II. It outlines the various forms and degrees of resistance and protest and the goals sought by a bewildering number of organizations (a glossary of acronyms is desperately needed). Appendixes provide a chronology of the Indian “awakening” since 1944, a summary of recent “anti-Indian aggressions,” and a blacklist of countries, companies, and organizations accused of actions or practices considered harmful to Native American interests (said actions range from genocide to encouraging acculturation). In his summation, Lecaillon argues that the motives of non-Indians (with the possible exception of himself) who adhere to or even sympathize with the Indian cause are suspect, that consequently Indians should trust no one and should direct their own resistance activities, and that ethnic autonomy and the recognition of a Pan-American native neoculture should be furthered.
From a different viewpoint, Ruggiero Romano finds that by the seventeenth century, “except in the most remote areas,” it had become almost impossible to speak of an indigenous population without including mestizos, zambos, and ladinos (clearly, this excludes those who still lived beyond the frontiers of European- African settlement). Surely our conscience and compassion should be aroused not just because someone is an “Indian” but when, like most people on Earth, that person is living in poverty and misery. The issue of how such poverty and misery might be alleviated is not seriously addressed in Résistances indiennes; the Balkanization of America would not seem to be a solution, nor would the revival of an “Inca Empire,” which is one group’s objective.
Romano, in Conjonctures opposées, recommends as “required reading for every aspiring historian” St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae. That and other self-revealing asides are, to this reviewer, the chief attraction of this book. Romano’s theme, that the Old and New worlds in the 1600s had “opposite conjunctures” in almost every respect, is stated in an introduction, restated in detail in four chapters (population, production, money, commerce), consolidated in a fifth chapter, and gone over once again in a final summary. Latin Americanists who are au courant with the published literature on this polemic will learn little, while novices would profit more from reading the works of Borah, Lynch, Bakewell, TePaske and Klein, Morineau, and Slicher van Bath. And, by all means, Thomas Aquinas.
